Videos: The Necromancer

I love designing moral quandaries to pose as challenges for my gaming groups. I mean, there’s the problem of “what to do with orc babies” that I’m sure you’re familiar with — moral quandaries are deeply personal to each character.

My group at the time had a Cleric who fancied himself something of a “moral policeman” — he didn’t have the Paladin’s code of conduct, but he played like he did. And there was no end to the shenanigans the party got into as a result.

We had a Rogue in the party who was a good team-player, but had a pretty neutral outlook. Our party also had a neutral Ranger, a neutral Sorcerer, and a neutral Fighter-Mage. None of them had particularly strong feelings toward morality, so they took cues from the Cleric and mostly stayed below the radar.

The Cleric got pretty extreme at times. I was working to create inter-character conflict by establishing situations easily enough solved through diplomatic means — which the Cleric would naturally escalate to violence due to his views.

When I set the stage however, it was one of the other players who “pulled the trigger,” and things went downhill pretty quickly from there. Three PCs died as a result of the encounter, and an unintended villain rose from the ashes…

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Discussion (3) ¬

Interesting scenario… It really shows what kind of party you have. Something similar happened in a friend’s game where a character who was not a necromancer, but similar enough for comparison’s sake, had taken an interest in the party and was going to ultimately give some pretty major assistance to us against a death lord in exchange for helping him remove the curse he was under. Of course most of the players were kind of murderhoboing, so when a guy shows up with armor and weapons made out of lost souls (the stigmata of his curse) saying “I’d like to make a deal”, half the party answered by immediately pouring all of their special attacks out against the guy.

I’ve heard the term “murder hobo” before but it’s been a while. I think it’s a fairly accurate description.

…But yeah, it really tells you something about who you’re gaming with — I like to issue challenges to NPCs whom I’ve decided have insulted my character, and I personally revel in challenges I receive in return.

Yeah, that also happened in my friend’s game, and that time I was the guilty party. One encounter, the leader of a group of NPCs targeted the party to try to weaken and subdue them. Now, these NPCs were actually good guys who just wanted to bring us in, and my character was the principal target since he was something of a combat monster. Rather than be subdued, my guy dashed through a swamp and ended up stabbing the guy in the face until even the abilities that let him turn his skin to metal weren’t going to be enough to stop me from killing him, and the rest of the party had to pull me off. Consequently, that was the same game and same guy that I ultimately pulled out of a battlesuit and murdered.

One thing my friend found out quick was that if he wanted any of his NPCs to live more than two sessions, they needed to not piss off anyone in the party.